Forum: Global warming as a con

I’m not part of a conspiracy. The oil companies are not writing me checks. I’m just an American speaking my mind.

And I think man-made global warming is a crock. Worse, I think it’s a fraud perpetrated on the developed world by an anarchist cult that wraps itself in liberalism and environmentalism. But global warming isn’t about the environment, it is about a new slavery.

This is a slavery that seeks to take away the economic freedom and prosperity of men and nations. A slavery that, like all slaveries, depends on the whip lash to succeed. That whip lash is a scorched-earth denunciation of those who dare disagree with the cult’s premise that the activity of mankind is warming the climate.

In the era of political correctness, when freedom of speech is functionally repealed, those who question global warming are equated with those who question the Holocaust. It has been proposed that publicly questioning global warming be criminalized, that people who do so be banned from certain professions or professional organizations.

Cult leaders have gone to extraordinary lengths to stigmatize and savage those who question their worldview. The most recent claim is that all those who disagree with them are part of a conspiracy funded by the oil companies.

Well, the oil companies don’t fund me — I fund them. I am their customer. I’m glad I can go to the gas station and fill my tank and drive anywhere I want to. In a pick-up truck. Or any other thing I want to.

I’m a free American, and that’s what drives these global warming tyrants absolutely nuts. They can’t stand the notion that Americans — and our economy — are free and beyond their control.

The problem is, we’re not going to stay that way for long. If the global warming Chicken Littles buffalo enough politicians and people, they will impose — in the name of fighting climate change — dramatic limits on American liberty that you might think we wouldn’t surrender without a fight. Our own personal mobility, our transportation structure, the affordability and quality of our lives are on the line as big-government high priests of global warming slit our throats.

But I refuse to be intimidated. They might take a lot of us down, but the truth remains the truth: Man is not causing climate change.

The entire man-made global warming argument has all the intellectual foundation and moral authority of the former consensus scientific view that the Earth was the center of the solar system. It is politics dressed up, unconvincingly, in science. It is a gambit to wrest power from conservatives and other freedom-loving people around the globe.

It is a cult which has replaced communism as the Western world’s greatest proponent of totalitarianism. It seeks to erase national borders and national sovereignty in a quest for global power. It is a revolution via media intimidation and brainwashing. Silent partners in its grasp for control includes interests as diverse as the Democratic Party and the kindergarten classroom, the Hollywood elite and the evening news. And it’s all baloney.

And we’re allowed to say so. Those who threaten us are shrill and petty dictators incapable of tolerating opinions other than their own. They cannot refute us, so they shout us down. They are a lynch mob in academic robes and anchorman suits.

But we are Americans, and free people the world over. And we are endowed by our Creator with what they wish to strip from us — liberty. I suggest you exercise it, before it goes away.

The climate may or may not be changing. The variability is large, our historic record is small. We don’t really know what constitutes hot or cold in any significant sense. But everything we know of natural history teaches us that change — including great climate change — is the way of nature. For centuries we have been retreating from the last ice age. We are still retreating. That’s a natural thing to which we will accommodate, just as humans have through every era we’ve lived in. Earth is not the center of the universe and man is not the master of this globe. And global warming is not true.

You have a right to believe that, and you have an obligation to say it.

BOB LONSBERRY

Commentator and talk show host. See BobLonsberry.com